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Thursday, 8 December 2016

Guest Post - Deborah Lawrenson - 300 days of sun

Today I'd like to welcome Author Deborah Lawrenson to Beadyjans books. Deborah is talking about the inspiration for her latest book 300 Days of Sun an intriguing suspenseful dual time mystery set in Faro Portugal. Her article is accompanied by some beautiful evocative images of Faro.

I apologize for not having been able to read this lovely sounding book yet, but having seen these stunning images and read Deborahs article I will be keeping it near the top of my rather large TBR pile.

Guest post by Deborah
Lawrenson

300 Days of Sun
is a twisty
story set in Portugal with an atmospheric sense of place, romance, suspense, and
wartime history.

In
Faro, Joanna, a journalist in her late thirties meets Nathan, a charismatic but
reckless younger man. He has recently discovered he is not who he thought he
was: he believes he may have been one of the Algarve’s notorious child kidnap
victims. The truth involves a story that began in Lisbon
during WW2, when the city was the escape hatch of Europe.
It uncovers a love story that crossed enemy lines - and puts them both in clear
and present danger.

When I was growing up, the
simple question “Where do you come from?” had no simple answer. I was asked it
often because I was always the new girl. As a diplomatic service family, we
moved across Europe, the Middle East and Asia and back again, interspersed with
a few years every now and then in London.

I went to ten schools,
starting with an international convent in Peking (as it was), and including an
American school in Brussels and a village school in Luxembourg. Home was less
the bolt-hole in London than it was the books and crockery that marked our camp
in foreign places. It was always clear, too, that the question of where I came
from was actually another way of asking “Who are you?”.

Deborah Lawrenson

Perhaps inevitably, states
of flux and identity have always interested me. Perhaps that’s also why I like
to write recognisable landscapes into my novels; the places are the anchors of
the story and the human characters reveal themselves in the way they react and
adapt to the setting.

Questions about identity run
through 300 Days of Sun. It’s an
issue that can be hard enough to answer in normal circumstances, but what
happens if a child grows to adulthood and discovers he is not the person he
thought he was? For Nathan, in the present-day storyline, his understanding of
his family, his childhood, his place in the world, is revealed to be a lie. How
can he ignore the urge to find out the truth? Would it even be possible to
ignore what he now knows?

Joanna, a journalist, is
also re-evaluating her life. When she and Nathan meet in Faro, Portugal, she is
wondering how to make a new start. He recognises her strengths, and asks her to
help him. Her determination to be true to herself, come what may, is crucial.

For Alva, in wartime Lisbon,
the moment she changes her perception of her circumstances – and her marriage -
is when she realises that her husband has no intention of taking her home to
America in 1940 after they have fled Paris. She is forced to adapt to life in Portugal, and in doing so, becomes
someone entirely different.

And
while Nathan and Alva are in the process of change – change neither of them has
sought in the first place – the world around them is unstable, too. Violent
storms re-draw coastal geography. Nature cannot be contained even with modern
sea-barrier engineering. Economic and political power shifts undermine the
individual.

Perhaps
appropriately, this novel has several different genre elements. It’s part
historical fiction, part romantic suspense, part literary thriller. I always
try to write in a way that transports the reader to a setting, capturing a
vivid sense of place and I research carefully to make the imaginary experience
as accurate as possible, whether that is the smells of the old town, or the
soft shushing sounds of the Portuguese language.

Is this
evocation of place a way of finding a calm still centre in the wild uproar of
life? I sometimes think so. As a writer, I’ve become more and more aware that
each book I offer a story to the reader - and a complex weave of subconscious
thoughts to myself. Sometimes it has been years after a novel was published
that I realise (or allow myself to realise) what the story was really about.

With
300 Days of Sun the time had come to
think about all those border crossings and classrooms full of unfamiliar faces,
and the fear and excitement of having to start all over again.

WELCOME TO MY WORLD OF BOOKS

Hello and welcome to my book blog. I hope you enjoy reading my reviews of books I've enjoyed.

I'm happy to consider advance review copies of new novels, in particular, literary historical fiction. I like thought provoking novels with an interesting female protagonist and have a particular penchant for pioneering women.